Walter Price: Pearl Lines

Text by Martin Clark, Darby English

“The paintings in Pearl Lines are a joyous combination of the carefree and the committed. Their sensibility is earnest, and their carnivalesque style engaging without looking labored.” – Artforum

Everything starts with a line, says Georgia-born, Brooklyn-based artist Walter Price (born 1989). Indeed, this volume, published in conjunction with his first UK exhibition, celebrates drawing as the foundation of Price’s practice. Employing a highly developed sense of line and composition, Price expands the mark-making possibilities of colored pencil, graphite, marker and oil pastel in constantly varying gestures paired with collage and appropriated printmaking methods. Quotidien motifs such as bathtubs, sofas and automobiles float amid bright fields of color. Price’s work blurs the boundaries between collective history and individual memory, figuration and abstraction, depicting ambiguous urban and domestic landscapes populated by indefinite, almost spectral, figures and objects.

Pearl Lines compiles works made during Price's residency at the Camden Art Centre in 2020, as well as a selection of recent paintings and works on paper produced in New York.